The third recipient of the awards was Arash Tajik, PHD Student (UIUC).

Erdem received the honor for his paper, titled, "Seeing the Invisible in Ultraviolet Spectrum: Early Diagnosis of Melanoma," and Callewart for his paper, titled, "A High Performance Long Wavelength Infrared Minority Electron Unipolar Photodetector Based on InAs/GaSb Superlattice for Early Breast Cancer Detection."

SPIE Photonics West 2014 is the largest and most influential event for the laser and photonics community in North America: 20,000 attendees, two exhibitions, 1,250 exhibiting companies, a wide range of papers on biomedical optics, biophotonics, translational research, industrial lasers, optoelectronics, microfabrication, optical MEMS, and more.